The Huffington Post is launching a “Twitter edition” that is intended to serve as an extension and a distinct entity from the main news and opinion site, the company told paidContent. The primary purpose is to harness the social networking aspects of the site to create a real-time news service for each of HuffPo’s 19 sections. The move follows the introduction of sponsored Tweets across a number of channels as part of president and chief revenue officer Greg Coleman’s goal doubling HuffPo’s revenue over the next year. But in separate conversations with co-founder and editor-in-chief Arianna Huffington, CEO Eric Hippeau and chairman Ken Lerer, I was told that the advertising part is secondary, at least for the moment.

Right now, the key thing is to get HuffPo users to accept and use the new Twitter edition format and the three executives are confident that they will. (Examples of the Twitter edition pages include tech, politics and comedy.)

“The idea is to produce an entirely separate edition from The Huffington Post with the same kind of content we always have provided—but super-charged, if you will, for Twitter users,” Lerer told paidContent. “We think it’s reasonable to assume that there will be more and more Twitter users; we think it’s here to stay. As more users get accustomed to it, this will be a way that users will increasingly seek their news from our site. I can see people coming to the main site and going to the Twitter editions. Eventually, I can see people just going to the Twitter edition instead of the main Huffington Post sites and verticals. Ultimately, it will end up being as significant an addition to The Huffington Post as we’ve made to date.”